Coming 2012: New Godzilla Movie- In IMAX 3D- But Will It Destroy All Monsters Or Merely Destroy Our Souls?

They’re making a new Godzilla movie, in not only IMAX but also in 3D, and I’m as excited about this as much as I am terrified. As I’ve said before, I think 3D is just razzle dazzle for idiots who won’t read subtitles because it ‘makes their eyes hurt’ and won’t watch black and white films because they’re ‘too boring’. The kind of people who think that anything would be improved if only it had another dimension. However, with Godzilla I might just be interested. After all, who doesn’t dream of having a building thrown at them by some sort of atomic super lizard (I’m not talking about Janiston this time)? And ZillaZilla is such an icon and a genius piece of mega lizard pop cultural joy that I’d be personally hurt if this turns out to be anything less than an excellent slice of destroying all monsters monster mash action.

 TEDIOUS BLIND HORRORS IN A LOVE MOTEL

Of course no-one wants (or should be subjected to) anything as eye-bleedingly bad as Roland Emmerich’s disasterous 90s version of the movie (1.5/10), which at the time was praised only for its soundtrack and made grown men hurl themselves off bridges to escape to a world where the movie didn’t exist. I’d made several attempts to make it through this most disastrous of disaster movies, but failed every time. I finally succeeded in braving it to the sub-Jurassic Park ending whilst trapped in a fairytale castle-shaped ‘love motel’ in rural Korea where the only other viewing choices were even worse Adam Sandler ‘comedies’ or stacks of dubious and boring Korean skin flicks. And even then we only turned to Godzilla once we had worked our way through a good deal of desperate screen panting and dead-eyed bed play before feeling brave (or drunk) enough to brave the tedious horrors of Emmerich’s vision. If you can call it ‘vision’. It’s probably more accurate to say ‘brain-defying, stupefying blindness’.

I love the original clutch of Godzilla movies, and I watched most of them in a desperate rush to consume as much Zilla nonsense as possible in my teenage years. There’s something wonderful about the squishy destructive charm at the heart of a man in a monster suit jumping on cardboard cityscapes that would be hard to recapture in the characterless bland nebula of the flurry of Computer Generated Idiocy we’ll no doubt be treated to this time. I just pray that they don’t fill it full of swollen talentless egos masquerading as stars or have a needlessly wisecracking giraffe in it or anything like that. The last thing we need is Paul Bettany lurching about with an idiotgun trying to figure out how to talk and shoot at the same time whilst spouting out nonsense wisecracks like ‘Take that, dinobreath’ or something probably even worse.

For a great celebrational video of Godzilla and friends in all their considerable glory (and brief horrific clip from the Emmerich movie), check this:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtube_gdata&v=8xW2xKDJoL4

That clip makes me glad to be alive.

SURREAL TERROR WITH TIN FOIL EYES

I want to see terrified Japanese commuters pointing at the sky in incomprehensible terror whilst a massive lizard monster lurches and lumbers about like a horny and aggro student who’s drunk too much sugary Bulmers, crashing through stuff and blasting everything with its blue-tinged, Hiroshima-inspired breath as it tries to figure out how to get to the people inside the JLR train in its scaly paw. Ideally, I’d like to see some of Godzilla’s ‘friends’ turn up and casually hurl oil tankers at him whilst screeching like teenage girls at a Twilight premiere and rolling their massive eyes about. The thought of Mecha King Ghidora flying about and shrieking its way around the city in glorious 3D seems to me to be the whole point of doing movies in three dimensions (and indeed gives a point to actually being alive as well). I’d also like to see MechaGodzilla (all the best monsters are in some way ‘Mecha’, like Jon Voight) and Megalon with his drill hands and Mothra with its surreal butterfly-appearance and coloured tin foil eyes. Mothra flapping out of the screen with its silly wail and waggling its deadly antennae would also be a superb use of 3D technology. And I want puppets, stop motion, and monster suits rather than CG idiot pixles!

However, how anyone can make a coherent and enjoyably exciting movie out of all of this deranged nonsense is anyone’s guess. I hope they can, but I’ve got a distinct feeling we’re in for a lot more lumpen clanking and exploding and an incredibly boring 2 hours during which you actually feel a part of you die. Like A-Team, but with monsters.

 GOT TO BE BETTER THAN CLOVERFIELD

Damnit, I really want this movie to be good! It shouldn’t be difficult to make a good monster walking around trashing a city movie, but somehow everyone has consistently failed to do it. The aforementioned Roland Emmerich’s 90s Godzilla was awful, but unbelievably no way near as tedious or irritating as the self-obsessed, odious and incredibly verbose twenty-somethings of the utterly unbearable and unbelievably boring Cloverfield (0.03/10), which although a very short film somehow managed the feat of seeming to last longer than your whole life up to that point as its idiot characters spouted absolute turgid diarrhoea masquerading as proper dialogue and made you wish that you had killed yourself before you or your parents had even been born. Cloverfield was one of the most aggravating and unpleasant cinematic experiences I’ve ever had to witness, from the soulcrushingly lazy and unimaginative framing device that opens the film to the very last second of its running time that you urge on with every breath as you wish that the roof would fall in and crush you to death before another second passes by. The experience of watching Cloverfield must be very much like the experience of what happens to the poor characters in The Human Centipede. I think I’d rather be forced to share one digestive system with two other people than watch Cloverfield again.

 DISTRACTED BY HATE

Anyway, I get distracted by hate- as usual. This new Godzilla doesn’t finally arrive until summer 2012, although its thunderous rumbling footsteps and ear liquefying shriek will likely be making their presence felt in hundreds and thousands of teaser trailers before then, thus meaning that you’ll be too bored with the whole thing to actually bother to see the film in the end. As ever, they’re talking about it being a return to what the fans want and remaining true to the original spirit of the movies. I’m sure those are just spurious lies, but you have to live in hope. Or else end it all now.

Here’s a link to more discussion about the movie, and also a picture of what Godzilla might look like: http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=68255

 Nuclear-powered, Biomechanical Lizard Stomping Regards

 Biolab

Does Anyone Care Anymore? Predators: A Review

Let me tell you a story. It’s only very brief, so don’t worry.

When I was very young I used to love sea food, especially prawns and mussels. Whenever I went on holiday with my family (which was invariably camping in France in those days) I would always have prawns and mussels. I used to look forward to eating them, and actually got quite excited about the prospect of eating them. I used to chomp and slurp those salty prawns and mussels down like nobody’s business (as, indeed, it was). But one day that all changed. I must’ve eaten a bad batch because I was suddenly and violently ill after eating a massive platter of prawns and mussels. Possibly my expectations were too high and I was too excited to dig in, but I was sick for hours that seemed like days and days that seemed like years. In many ways I have never recovered, and I haven’t eaten a mussel since. In fact, the mere smell or sight of them now brings back that nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach and I have to leave the room.

Why do I tell you this (true) story? Because it almost exactly mirrors my engagement with the Predator franchise. Right down to the salty, back of the throat vomiting and gut churning terror.

 MESSY SPLATTERED VOMIT

 I’ve ranted before about my misgivings and anxieties about Robert ‘Let’s Blow It Up With Wisecracks’ Rodriguez getting involved with this series, and you can read them in my Clanking And Exploding article earlier. Yet still, against every fibre of my being, I sat in the cinema with a mixed feeling of excitement and nausea as I waited for it to start. 

I wish I hadn’t. My time would have been better spent eating duck penis or being trampled by bulls.

Frankly this is a big messy splattered vomit of a movie, with all sorts of half-digested ideas slopping about all over the place like foul bile. Not the sort of appetising morsel you’d want to guzzle. More the sort of half-formed slop you’d think twice before feeding a starving mangy cat, and then wouldn’t. For every one thing these idiot filmmakers got right, they managed to get a dozen things wrong.

It seemed almost as if the filmmakers had a total misunderstanding of what had made the first two movies (and yes, I said the FIRST TWO MOVIES and that INCLUDES Predator 2) so good. They made numerous and idiotic attempts (as every pricklet that gets their hands on this franchise seems to do) to add to and evolve what we’d seen earlier, but only succeeded in making it into a tiresome spectacle of repeated explosions and resolutely ungripping awfulness.

 A TOTAL ABSENCE OF PULPY JOY

 Firstly, despite the masterstroke of actually using the music from the first film (albeit totally ineptly) the film never ever recovered from the totally ludicrous and downright lazy premise it was burdened with. Supposedly in an attempt to be the worst plot of all time, a bunch of totally unsympathetic and uninterestingly generic “characters” were literally dropped out of the sky into a jungle on a planet that was apparently a hunting ground for the Predator creatures. And as you watch the film that is as boring as it sounds. I’d rather just have watched a static shot of the jungle for two hours with Alan Silvestri’s wonderful music playing over the top.

The cast and characters were totally flat and as forgettable as a Damien Rice song, the tone of the film totally incorrect. The pleasurable pulpy joy of the first two movies was entirely absent, replaced instead by an overly serious attitude and confusing chaos of events that were as inexplicable as they were irritating. The first encounter with the monsters was just a confused blur of uselessness, shoddily executed and bringing back bad memories of the beyond awful AVP movies and making me wish I could send my poor eyeballs back to hell where they belong. The final battle was equally confounding and felt like watching one of your worst enemies playing a video game and molesting your kid sister whilst you lay in foul sewage with a bad hangover recalling that last night you killed your own grandparents by bludgeoning them to death with your beloved family dog (which you had also molested). People around me in the theatre laughed at the sight of Adrien Brody minus a shirt. There was no tension, no terror, no spark. 

SCAVENGERS

They were always going to be treading a fine line with drawing Predators so closely to the first film, making it vulnerable to unfavourable comparisons. The jackasses! Like a decomposing corpse riddled with maggots, this new film was riddled with references to Predator that went beyond being mere references and instead made me think the filmmakers thought they were in some way ‘improving’ on what the original had so effortlessly achieved. No such luck. Don’t reference a great movie unless you can better it. And then shut up. 

One of the clearest signposts of the muddle that this film was is that we had to be constantly told by the onscreen characters what was happening! This is not because we’re stupid, but because the film was such a confusing splurge of half-baked ideas and illogical conclusions that you would need to be a mindreader to understand what they thought they were trying to achieve and follow the bizarre turns of events. I particularly enjoyed the hysterical cry of ‘He’s a scavenger!’ This was definitely the best line in the movie (partly because it came totally out of the blue and was just so peculiar), but it’s no way near ‘I ain’t got time to bleed’ or any of the other genius moments from the earlier films. Try again, idiots. Or actually- don’t. Don’t ever try again.

 EYEBALL ABUSE

To be fair, there were vague scattered points early on in the film that made you think (hope) it was going to pull itself together, but it never really cohered into anything and as soon as you started to get your hopes up then something totally stupid would happen, like the introduction of new ‘hunting dog’ creatures that looked like teenage Slipknot fans, or a semi-civilised exchange between human and monster that was like something out of Brief Encounter. Or an idiotic swordfight in a cornfield. Or Jennifer Aniston singing a showtune. True, I made that last one up, but it could have slotted in nicely amid the gibberish and irrational idiocy being gummed over our eyeballs.

IN SUMMARY

So essentially this was a film of unfathomable choices, useless new ideas, and a final nail in the coffin of a series I once loved as a youngster. It’s dead for me now. I’m not watching any more of these movies. I’ve taken all the disappointment I can have! The door on my boyish dreams has been forever slammed shut.

Unless they actually get around to making that Pride and Predator movie I was hearing so much about of course.

GAME OVER.

 Predators: 2/10

 Bitterly Disappointed Regards

 Biolab

Lady GaGa To Star In Remake Of Double Indemnity!

TOTAL HOLLYWOOD RUMOUR SPOILER ALERT!

Hot off the interwire:

Lady GaGa (yes, Lady GaGa) is to star in a remake of Noir classic Double Indemnity!

Often referred to as one of the greatest movies ever made, insurance scam classic Double Indemnity is set to get the Hollywood remake treatment with one of the hottest stars on the planet and with a CGI cranking budget that will make yours eyes water and your balls shrivel back to whence they came.

Those clever idiots down in LA have exhumed original director Billy Wilder’s corpse and crushed it down to make a USB stick. Using the latest technology that James Cameron has available they have then used this to download his consciousness into an iPhone so he can direct the movie!

Apparently it will not be a simple retread of the original, but a ‘reimagining’ that top executives feel will ‘reboot’ a franchise that will not doubt slither its way onto your screens soon and change your lives.

Expect joy!

Deeply Sarcastic Regards

Pablum

 

 

Brand Awareness: An Incontinent Rectum and Who Is The Funniest Russell?

First of all, I’m not slacking off with my vitriolic pablum, I’ve just been busy with a newly arrived baby (mine) and initiating job transfer.  

TEDIOUS IDIOTPUSS

Now I notice that in the interim that odious, pompous idiotpuss Russell Brand has another movie out. Some trashy fluff about a rockstar having to be escorted from A to B apparently. Sounds tedious. And whilst I’m sure this is all very funny, high quality and innovative comedy for twats, and no doubt has some idiots laughing all the way to the bank, it strikes me very much as a waste of the poor viewing public’s time and yet another harbinger of some sort of much needed apocalypse. Surely not long now before an angry and culturally astute god smites us down with great strength and furious anger and grinds us into the people paste we richly deserve to be reduced to.

In case you’re unsure where I stand on this, I don’t find Mr Brand in the least bit funny. But then I don’t find cancer or the conflict over Gaza or teenage bodies buried in some psychopath’s back garden funny either. Make any of these things on fire and you might be getting closer to raising a smile. Set the blathering touslehaired twitpin on fire and you’re closer still.

 TOO NASTY

Oh, that’s too nasty. It’s not often that you find yourself wishing a life-ending relapse into drug hell on someone you don’t even know, but then it’s not every day that someone is so intent on smearing the bulging, turtleheaded rectum of their ego in your face like some sort of vengeful and incontinent lap dancer. And lest we forget, this ‘comedian’ once released an opus entitled ‘My Booky Wook’, so let’s not feel too bad. And I know I too have a penchant for spewing my own diarrhetic musings out like some sort of vast ass, so maybe we have more in common than I’d care to admit.

WHO IS THE FUNNIEST RUSSELL?

 So with all the success this scum sucking pricklet is enjoying, it got me wondering: ‘Who is the funniest Russell? Because it surely can’t be this gobshite. Is there one? There’s Russell Crowe with his stupidly-titled barroom band. There are Jack Russells, which I guess sometimes ‘do the funniest things.’ There’s Russell Howard, some sort of so-called comedian who claims to deliver good news but the only good news he could possibly give me would be that he’s retired from comedy and gotten a new job in a meat canning factory where he can blather on to his heart’s content but no-one can hear his ‘good news’ over the sound of reformed meat being pressed into tins. And of course there’s Russ Abbott. But does he count?

All of which just made me think that maybe the funniest Russell is Russell & Bromley (the shoe shop) because I can almost imagine someone falling over in there one day in a Chaplin-esque manner.

Have I missed anyone out?

Bleakly Comedic Regards

Biolab

Clanking And Exploding: The Sad State Of Sci-Fi

I’m concerned and tired. Concerned about sci-fi and tired of things clanking and exploding.

CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENT OF YOUTH

I’ve been filled with this foul tasting disappointment and righteous fury ever since that idiot Joss Whedon got his irritatingly gilded claws all over the Alien franchise and proceeded to piss over it as if it commanded no more respect than a Fast & Furious movie. In my idealistic and hope-filled teen years, I remember lining up excitedly to see Alien Resurrection with all the enthusiasm that only youth can bring, only to be curiously crushed after seeing the CGI-infused pap they had lazily churned out. Not adding anything but ludicrously misjudged awfulness, and displaying a total misunderstanding of what I wanted from the franchise, it was like having your own mother spit your sister’s faeces in your face and then crushing each of your eyeballs underfoot like grapes. Well done, idiots. I was more disappointed than I would have been had they ruined Jesus’ resurrection by splicing his DNA with Jennifer Aniston’s and attempting to give him some sort of quirky teen backstory. That was the end of my youth.

CYBORG WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S

Stupidly, and going against every fibre of my being, I lined up to see Terminator 3, and later Terminator: Salvation, with a similar feeling of excitement. All right, it wasn’t Alien (the love of my young life), but it had a fair chance of being good. In my mind, it shouldn’t be difficult to make a terrifyingly tense and dreadfully scary movie about a cyborg killing machine intent on wiping out the human race. But somehow, with Terminator 3, they seemed to have decided to try and make post-OC version of Weekend At Bernie’s, complete with vacuous sunglasses jokes and for some reason almost no violence. The only reason to watch it was for the leather-clad blonde lady. And Terminator: Salvation- well that somehow managed to be even worse!

Walking into Salvation,  I had convinced myself that it would be impossible for them to fuck this up. Making an exciting film about a climactic war between people and machines should be as simple as the brain-dead zombies who write articles about Jordan and Peter for the terminally idiotic, shouldn’t it? It should be as easy as outwitting a Nickelback fan! But somehow, as I watched the sheer pointless vapidity unspooling before my poor eyes, I realised that McG had managed to churn out something that was so boring I was looking at my watch every ten minutes before the halfway mark and wishing that the whole human race had never existed, so ashamed was I to be a human.

CLANKING AND EXPLODING

And that’s the problem- a slew of CGI explosions and non-entity characters does not make for an exciting or even vaguely interesting film. Terminator: Salvation was just an endless slog of things clanking and exploding, with a pointless cameo from Helena Bonham-Carter in it, and it was SO BORING I WANTED TO DIE. Transformers 2 was almost entirely the same. Once you’ve seen one thing clank and explode, you’ve seen them all! Of course, McG said when making that awful Terminator experience that he was fully aware of the legacy of the previous films, and what the fans were hoping for, and the faults with the previous film and blah blah blah. Promises were made, but on watching the film it’s painfully obvious that neither he nor anyone else involved in the making of the film gave a shit about anything, or anyone, ever.

FILMIC ‘FINAL SOLUTION’

And that’s what worries me with this new Predators film. Robert Rodriguez can go on all he likes about being a fan of the original 2 films, and wanting to build respectfully on those. Both him and director Nimrod Antal talk about being aware of and avoiding the pitfalls of the mindless, vacuous tosh that were the Alien Vs Predator films- which somehow managed the feat of BEING EVEN WORSE THAN YOU WOULD EXPECT, despite me expecting a sort of filmic Final Solution. But at the end of the day I doubt either Rodriguez or Antal really give a flying shit, and from the trailer that’s now doing the rounds online it’s clear that all this talk of respectfully trying to make a decent film rather than a jumped up toy advert of a cash-in are well and truly LIES.

The plot (a number of tough idiots find themselves whisked to an alien jungle for some sort of already tedious alien hunting party) is ludicrous beyond all comprehension, and already bores the living hell out of me just thinking about it. The fact that they’re talking excitedly about introducing new creatures frankly makes me sick! They’re also talking about trying to make it funny, and of revealing the creature pretty much straight away. In a recent interview that Airlock sent me, both Rodriguez and Antal suggested that modern audiences would be too impatient and dim-witted to wait 40 minutes of tension out to see a monster. Way to respect your audience, eh? Who is this audience made up of- attention deficit disorder fuelled three year olds? 

ECSTASY OF IDIOT PIXELS

I’d like to see a movie where they don’t reveal the creature until the final five minutes, and just continually rachet up the tension and characterisation until then. I’m more interested in that than watching some sort of foxy female predator clank and explode her way onto the screen in an ecstasy of idiot pixels.

Haven’t they just fundamentally disregarded (or misunderstood, more likely) what made the original two films so great? You don’t need more creatures. In fact, you don’t need more anything. We don’t need to be baby stepped through all our films. We’re not ALL idiots (despite the fact that so many of us went to see the Da Vinci Code). Why the hell someone whose best movies are the Spy Kids series has been allowed anywhere near making a Predator film is totally beyond me. Still, I’ll probably buy the lunchbox and go see the movie. They could have had Why Bird making it and I’d have gone.

DULL

I also hear a dull rumbling that Ridley Scott is looking to make another Alien movie. In 3D- of course! This will obviously be a movie for all you pricklets and numbskulls out there that watched Alien and thought that it could have been a good movie if only they’d made it in 3D. With more lasers and monsters and CGI. And lots of clanking and exploding. With Jennifer Aniston playing Ripley and Vin Diesel playing the alien.

I expect they’ll even slap a Linkin Park soundtrack on it. Bliss.

Clanked-out Regards

Biolab